Border-Line Embodiments

Grace Kelly

Project Description

This project titled, “Border-Line Embodiments” is the culmination of several years steeped heavily in poetic and academic entanglement. It is a poetic chapbook of interwoven academic language and ideas surrounding critical topics of immigration, feminine bodies, identity politics, and the political imaginary, which intersect on varying levels with climate justice, race, and indigeneity. The book is a conversation with scholars, poets, artists, and activists internationally who have written about the forced migratory experience, land and belonging, violence upon feminine bodies, and where scholarship intervenes. I enter as a queer poet and aspiring academic that feels in her bones and in the tethers of her malleable brain that academia has become an institution of disciplinary isolation and systemic silencing, particularly in the ways that it separates us (as readers, curious beings, writers, knowledge keepers, artists, etc) from home. From what is felt in our bodies and in touch with others. I aim to disrupt what is purely academic through the entanglement of poetic and academic writing as well as practice. In this book, poetry when encountered with academic language and ideas reveals a literary and intellectual kinship, a relational framework. Academia and poetry affect each other, they express to and with each other, becoming an evocative force of knowing and feeling. Additionally, as text and scholarship is entangled, the design of the book itself speaks to its argument as images, page and font design, as well as illustrations are threads utterly distinct yet inseparable from each other and the substance of the book. I am in collaboration with a dear friend and illustrator Flora Hu who aids in the bringing to life of my original ideas through her expertise and craft.

What Form will your Final Project Take?

Hand-bound book.

describe the image of yourself in 280 characters: This is an image of the completed project in a spread format.

Who was supporting you in your work?

Alexandra Delano. This process was iterative. I worked directly with my advisors and incorporated their feedback. We met in the Capstone class and on a one:one basis once a week.

Project Themes:

Research, Creative

How has this project has been impactful or transformative?

It was incredibly impactful to me to collaborate or entangle with my illustrator Flora. This bloomed and enriched the depth of the project. I have loved learning together with her as she represents an expert in the field of design which I am not familiar with. I would encourage others to explore other mediums they are not familiar with.

What would you do differently?

I would begin the process earlier and take more time for sourcing my materials. I underestimated the energy and time it would take to have the materiality of the project reflect the content.

How was the experience connected to your work?

This is the ultimate expansion of my academic experience as an undergraduate student at Eugene Lang College. It is the culmination of my years here as a growing academic and poet whose identity is shaped by the world that is full of paradoxical elements of structure and fluidity.

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